The Black Babies EP

It's the middle of the night. You're sound asleep. Suddenly, the phone rings and all the sweet, sweet ...

It's the middle of the night. You're sound asleep. Suddenly, the phone rings and all the sweet, sweet serotonin gets sucked straight from your brain in a mere instant. So now you're awake, but you're too tired to get up and answer the phone. The machine picks up, and someone on the other end starts plucking a guitar and singing in a vaguely creepy, almost gender neutral tenor. It's bone-chilling in the darkness. When it's over you struggle back into fitful, paranoid sleep, and in the morning when you wake up, the message is there. After several listens, you still don't know who it is, but the song is starting to make sense. It's actually pretty good.

Devendra Banhart's music ingratiates itself to you like this. His simple songs-- typically two, maybe three chords, one acoustic guitar, and his shaky, freakish vocals layered on top-- have an archaic, almost primitive feel to them that's utterly otherwordly, and yet strangely, deeply American. Harry Smith would have heard treasure here, and Banhart's output shares a lot of ground with the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music's creakiest selections. Plus, it sounds like it was recorded on an answering machine, engulfed in hiss and night sounds.

That's somewhat by design, of course, at least as far as the actual releases of this mini-album (eight songs in 23 minutes) and his first full-length (2002's Oh Me Oh My) are concerned. Young God Records honcho and erstwhile Swan/meanwhile Angel of Light Michael Gira first heard Banhart via a rough demo that came in the mail and couldn't bring himself to have the kid come into the studio to polish the songs up. He felt that they sounded pretty well perfect as they were, and he was right-- it's hard to imagine these songs presented with any amount of gloss.

The story goes that young Devendra was always recording these songs for himself on cheap recording devices and had to be convinced by friends and family to send them around to labels. The result is an uncanny honesty and open imperfection to the songs that would be impossible to capture in a studio. "Cosmos and Delos" is ink black and spare, with skeletal guitar figures and what sounds like a distant gunshot and street noise in the background. Banhart sings with himself in extremely close harmony, creating melody out of a near-drone.

Banhart proves himself an able guitarist on "Lagoon", filling in the melodic gaps with gorgeous, cascading lines. The lyrics are almost inscrutably obtuse, with strange non-sequiturs like "Never been to Minnesota/ Still I'd love to live in Maine/ Never been to Salamanca/ Still I'd love to live in Spain". "The Charles C. Leary" is my favorite lyrically, detailing a series of surreal, dreamlike vignettes of a possible shipwreck. "I lost the gloves my mother gave me/ While on the way to the make believe sea," he intones over a bobbing guitar part-- the song throbs and sways with seasickness, speeding up and slowing down as befits the urgency of each respective verse.

Though it can be thoroughly engrossing, it bears noting that Banhart's music is decidedly not for everyone. If the sounds of the backwoods-- real or imagined-- appeal to you, Banhart will give you chills in the best way possible; if you're more into polish and can't stomach the deeply surreal, caution is definitely in your best interest. Still, Banhart is a singular talent, and if he hits you right, you'll be only too happy to be held in his thrall.